Erosion – Olivia Canny

July 24, 2024

“I don’t know why I keep ending up back on this ledge,” you say. You bite off a finger nail and gaze at an endless landscape. Vegetation recedes into mist and emerges as a mountain face with glacial ridges, scraping what looks like heaven, but it’s impossible to tell from here. I take a picture at 0.5x.

“Probably because you like the view,” I reply. To be fair, it is beautiful. You like it up here because you’re high enough to see how far we all strayed from God but not so high that you lose your humanity. High enough that you’re watching the downfall of civilization but not participating in it. If I didn’t know you, I’d be worried you’re about to jump. But I do know you, so I know that you’d rather be suspended in indecision forever than on your way to the only thing that’s certain.

I pull my knees to my chest in the passenger seat and put on “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins.

“Please,” you beg, “not that song. It makes me feel things too deeply.”

“Isn’t that the point?” I ask.

“Of course,” you reply. “But I don’t need to feel any more than I already do.”

“I think feeling things is my hobby,” I say. “Sometimes I wish it were my job.”

We’re flying between corn fields on an interstate. You seem to know exactly which exit to take and exactly which gravel road will lead us to a secret, fertile paradise, tucked in the hills behind industrial farms. I take a picture at 0.5x.

Last night I asked you what you wanted for your birthday, but you didn’t give me a straight answer. And now it’s the morning of and I completely forgot. Understandably, you are hurt.

“I’ve been having so much fun with you that I don’t even know what day it is,” I say in an attempt to defend myself. And although it’s the truth, you can’t quite forgive me. Now, I am hurt. But I don’t have much of an excuse. I rarely do.

We’re on our way to a vineyard that sells sangria by the gallon. My father tells us: “The last time I had sangria was the last time I was truly happy.” He’s 35 years sober and 30 years married and just kidding.

I think about asking you: “Gay son or thot daughter?” But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Instead I ask: “Drunk uncle or depressed dad?”

“Well,” you say, “I’m already kind of a drunk uncle. But I always thought I’d be a dad someday. ”

I nod and follow up: “Por que no los dos?”

“The future is muy oscuro,” you mumble. “Very dark.”

You’re kissing me as I write this, so your face is turned away from the screen and you have no idea how hard I’m trying to describe our friction. The energy lost in friction is created and destroyed, so there’s no net loss of energy. And yet we’re still moving, creating and destroying ourselves again and again along the way. So then what’s it all for, anyway?

You ask yourself this all the time. What’s it all for?

I document everything beautiful so that one day I can remind you. I document everything ugly so that I can remind myself.

We’re at the end of a coastal highway in New England, in an empty parking lot at the base of a lighthouse. I take a picture at 0.5x. We hike to the other side to watch the ocean attack the coast. It slams itself into the rocks like it’s throwing a tantrum, like it can’t decide if it wants to hug or hit the shoreline so it just does both. The outcome of this violence cannot be measured in a single lifetime. Or a pair of lifetimes. But today we can see the water pool in little pockets and ridges of its own making, coming to rest after an eternity of pushing and pulling.

“Nature without God is like sex without love,” you muse.

“I want all of those things,” I say. “Don’t you?”